4.9 β’ 606 Ratings
ποΈ 21 October 2019
β±οΈ 71 minutes
ποΈ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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0:00.0 | What's up, everybody? |
0:08.6 | This is Cortland from EndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the EndieHackers podcast. |
0:12.8 | On this show, I talked to the founders' profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. |
0:18.6 | How did they get to where they are today? |
0:20.1 | How did they make decisions, both of their companies and in their personal lives, and what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses. Today, I am talking to Tyler King. Tyler, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. You are the CEO and founder of a company called Less Annoying CRM. |
0:21.3 | I love that name. I've had a couple founders on the podcast recently who have product names that tell you exactly what they're doing and pretty much spell it out. But nevertheless, why don't you explain to us what Less Acknowing CRM does? Yeah, yeah, well, that's the goal because, as I'll probably say, several times today, we're bad at marketing. |
0:55.8 | So it's good if our name just says the whole value proposition at the beginning. |
1:00.0 | So basically, we are a CRM, a customer relationship manager. |
1:04.1 | There's a whole history of the CRM industry that's basically, they're designed for really, |
1:08.1 | really big companies with really sophisticated needs. |
1:10.3 | So Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics and all of them are really powerful, but probably overkill for a small business. |
1:17.6 | So what we do is we make just a simple contact manager for people who need a place to store all that for their business, |
1:23.7 | but not all the bells and whistles and automation and all that stuff that a bigger company |
1:27.8 | might need. The CRM space is obviously not new. It's not particularly unique. There are |
1:33.6 | tons and tons of companies working on various types of CRMs, and there have been for the last |
1:39.0 | two decades, and yet you guys have managed to stick it out and do really well for yourselves. |
1:43.9 | So you've bootstrapped your way here. You have 22,000 paying customers, and you charge them, what, $10 a month per customer? That's right. And we actually hit $22,000 about an hour ago. So we're officially at $22,000. Cool. Yeah, I was just rounding up from $21,000 something, but now I'm actually right. So I feel pretty good about that. So you're doing over $2.6 million in annual recurring revenue. And I think what's really cool is like putting these two things together, the fact that you came up with an idea that's not particularly unique. It's not like you found some entirely unexplored market that no one's |
2:18.8 | ever hit before. You have this totally brand new, unique idea. You've done something in sort of well-trodden |
2:23.9 | territory. And a lot of people think that they can't get started with an idea unless it's totally |
2:29.3 | unique. And so I'm excited to sort of dive into how you did that, how you realize this was a good idea in the first place, and how do you make a business work when you have so much competition and you're not, you know, innovating at the front bleeding edge of new technology and new ideas. Yeah, because there's a certain risk you take by going into a industry that has a lot of competition. Exactly. And that risk is that you can't build't build the better mouse trap. But there's a different type of risk if you go into something brand new, which is that no one even wants it. And if I have to pick between those two risks, I trust myself to build the mouse trap a lot more than I trust myself to create a market that didn't exist before. Yeah, it's a tradeoff. and a lot of times people go into one and they think that's not a trade-off. |
3:05.8 | They think, oh, I'm doing something that's brand new. And so that's perfect. Now I just went. But you're right. Like, now you have to prove that people even care about this new thing that you're building that no one's ever built before. And a lot of times that kills people's companies. and in your situation, like you've got a lot of competition, |
3:07.8 | which means you have to innovate in other areas. |
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